North Platte River

Now, as we crossed the North Platte River and ran on toward Rawlins in May, over the road were veils of blowing snow. This was Wyoming, not some nice mild place like Baffin Island-Wyoming, a landlocked Spitsbergen-and gently, almost imperceptibly, we were climbing. The snow did not obscure the structure. We were running above-and, in the roadcuts, among-strata that were leaning toward us, strata that were influenced by the Rawlins Uplift, which could be regarded as a failed mountain range. The Medicine Bow Mountains and the Sierra Madre stood off to the south, and while they and other ranges were rising this one had tried, too, but had succeeded merely in warping the flat land. The tilt of the strata was steeper than the road. Therefore, as we moved from cut to cut we were descending in time, downsection, each kantoor huren per uur amsterdam successive layer stratigraphically lower and older than the one before. Had this been a May morning a hundred million years ago, in Cretaceous time, we would have been many fathoms underwater, in a broad arm of tl1e sea, which covered the continental platform-reached across the North American craton, the Stable Interior Craton-from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean. The North Platte, scratching out the present landscape, had worked itself down into some dark shales that had been black muds in the organic richness of that epicratonic sea. The salt water rose and fell, spread and receded through time -in Love’s words, “advanced westward and then retreated, then advanced and retreated over and over again, leaving thick sequences of intertonguing sandstone and shale” -repeatedly exposing fresh coastal plains, and as surely flooding them once more. In what has become dry mountain country, vegetation flourished in kantoor huren per uur rotterdam coastal swamps. They would have been like the Florida Everglades, the peat fens of East Anglia, or borders of the Java Sea, which stand just as temporarily, and after they are flooded by a rising ocean may be buried under sand and mud, and reported to the future as coal. There were seams of coal in the roadcuts, under the layers of sandstone and shale. The Cretaceous swamps were particularly abundant in this part of Wyoming. A hundred million years later, the Union Pacific Railroad would choose this right-of-way so it could fuel itself with the coal.